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Apr 15, 2026
Editor: The final paradraphs of Stephens propganda: don’t name it a blitz, but a whimper of chatter box with zero experience of war: but was trained buy The Jerusalem Post! The reader grows weary, yet Stephens in the final paragraph reaches for the political shopworn as his flaccid denouement!
The principle is simple: Israel will get out of Lebanon the moment Iran gets out of Lebanon. Failing that, the United States should give Israel a green light to continue degrading Hezbollah’s capabilities until it can no longer initiate wars against Israel, as the group did in 2006, 2023 and again this year. If other states, particularly France as Lebanon’s former colonial power, object to this, they can always volunteer to send their own troops to enforce the U.N. Security Council resolution that Hezbollah has been violating for nearly 20 years.
Finally, Trump can offer the regime a grand bargain: what I’ve long called “normalization for normalization.”
Iran could get an end to both war and blockade, full relief from international sanctions, the resumption of diplomatic and commercial relations with the United States and every other benefit that Tehran used to enjoy before the Islamic revolution of 1979. In return, all that would be asked of Iran is to behave like a normal country: no efforts to support armed militias throughout the region, or harbor Qaeda leaders, or send hit squads to kill or kidnap enemies abroad, or declare “death to Israel” and “death to America” as foundational principles of the regime while trying to build nuclear weapons.
Does any of that sound outrageous? Of course not. The outrage is that the regime’s current leaders would almost certainly dismiss the proposal out of hand because ideological militancy, rather than fidelity to the interests of the Iranian people, is what has defined them for the past 47 years.
The moment an Iranian government, including the current one, accepts these terms, we’ll know that we are dealing with a fundamentally different regime. It would be statesmanlike of Trump to propose it — and wise of him to keep turning the screws on the regime’s leaders until they accept it.
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